


Blinking Lights and Ringing Bells

by taggianto



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-20
Updated: 2012-08-20
Packaged: 2017-11-12 12:35:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/491089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taggianto/pseuds/taggianto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim had never been gone this long before. The question was, would he be coming back?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blinking Lights and Ringing Bells

It was too fucking cold.

Sebastian stamped his feet against the frozen ground, breathed into his gloved hands and still he shivered. Too cold, too cold, too cold. The walk hadn’t been a long one, but the wind was harsh as it whipped through the deserted streets. Tiny lights twinkled in the shop windows as he walked past; Christmas had come and gone last week, but the lights remained. Sebastian thought of the lights on their tiny tree in the flat. Jim had made such a fuss, but Sebastian insisted that this year they were going to have a fucking tree even if he had to go out and chop one down himself.

Jim’s present was still under there, still wrapped.

He looked up at the tall brick steeple of St. Patrick’s Church, muted by the grey of the night and the falling snow. Sebastian Moran was not a religious man, and yet…

And yet he remembered the comfort he’d found in the church as a child. Something about the solidity of the walls, the pattern in the rows of pews, the hush that fell as soon as you crossed the vestibule. It was that comfort he was seeking now, not some divine intervention from a power on high. With another sigh of frosted breath, Sebastian entered the church.

Inside it was silent (and warm, thank God, he thought dryly). Though the building was empty, its doors were always open to those who needed it. Sebastian didn’t exactly know what he needed right now, he just knew he couldn’t be in the flat any more. Oddly enough, it was the silence of the flat that had driven him to the silence of the church. But the silence that surrounded him now wasn’t empty like it was back home. Here, silence was expected. Nothing was missing here.

Three weeks. Three weeks without a single word. Three weeks without a touch, a text, the sound of his bloody voice and Sebastian was going insane. Every morning he expected to wake up with him there and every morning his bed was just as cold as the night before. Every morning the automatic coffee pot spat out two cups and every morning only one was ever emptied. Every morning he waited and Jim just wasn’t there.

Three weeks ago he’d gotten the message, their safe word, their “I’m okay but I need to disappear for a while, don’t worry,” code. They’d used it before, once or twice, but each time Jim had only been gone for a day or two at the most. The first week, Sebastian had carried on as normal, run the business side of things just as he would have if Jim had been there. The second week and he was coming to the end of the list of what he could do without Jim’s input.

The third week had him at the gun range every day just to let out his frustration.

And now here he was sitting in a worn pew of an empty church, feeling small and lost and afraid. Yes, afraid. Sebastian had stared down the barrel of a gun more times than he could count but right now he was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. He honestly didn’t know what he’d do if Jim… If he never… Fuck, he couldn’t even think it. He felt off balance, he felt hollow and the worst part was knowing he  _couldn’t_  know if it would ever end. If Jim would ever come home or if he would be forced to wander through this life without the man who had become his world. He stared at his hands.

He didn’t know how long he could last like this.

Somewhere near the front of the church a door creaked and opened. Sebastian’s heart skipped with hope, despite his trying to keep a level head. He heard footsteps approaching and he squeezed his eyes shut. Maybe, if there was a God… Please…

“Can I help you, my son?”

Sebastian blinked and raised his head. The kindly eyes of a priest looked down on him as his heart sank.  _What did you honestly expect, Sebastian?_  He shook his head. “I’m fine.” The priest just smiled knowingly and moved on. At least he knew enough not to pry. A few footsteps later, a door at the back of the church opened and quietly closed.

 _Pull yourself together, Moran._  He sank to his knees and rested his arms on the back of the pew before him. Deep breaths, in and out. Just listen to the silence. The hum of the electric lights, the rush of air through a vent, water running somewhere in the distance. How long he knelt there he didn’t know, but when he finally stood his legs were slightly numb and the early glow of dawn was melting through the stained glass windows.

He felt calmer as he exited the building, though he couldn’t tell if that was better or worse. It was still bitterly cold.

\---

Every night, Sebastian found himself standing outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Sometimes he went in, sometimes he simply stood across the street, leaning against a lamppost and watching the flicker of candlelight through stained glass windows. A late night mass had him slipping quietly into the rearmost pew, mouthing along to prayers he hadn’t recited since he was a boy. He still knew all the words.

He was doing his best, by day, to gather together the threads of Jim’s empire. Things weren’t crumbling, though, not as much as he had anticipated, far from it. Jim must have done some planning in advance because really, things should have been more out of control than they were right now. Did he plan this? Did he fucking know he’d be disappearing and did he put things in order without telling Sebastian? If he did… Unless Jim was still running things while hidden? Sebastian was in two minds about that. After all, it would mean that Jim was still alive. But it also meant he was still staying away from him.

He just wanted Jim to come home.

Their little tree was starting to drop its needles, but Sebastian refused to take it down. He was hyper vigilant about tending to the dying plant as if his devotion to keeping it alive might somehow bring Jim back. He didn’t even try to reason through the logic on that one, it was something to focus on at least. He’d added a couple ornaments he’d found on his nightly walks. They had been clinging to the branches of trees put out for disposal, past their purpose, no longer necessary. Unwanted.

He stopped going to the gun range after he walked in one afternoon to find a bright, young-faced boy teaching his girlfriend a proper pistol grip. The boy was standing behind his girl, hips flush, hands over hers on the gun and his mind had flashed to the night he’d done the same with a slightly drunk Jim, using a banana as a stand-in for the gun’s grip. That was years ago, before they were even married, when he was just starting to realize that this was becoming about more than just the sex for the both of them. Depression, loss and high powered firearms were not exactly a healthy combination, so Sebastian focused on this weird new obsession with the church.

New Year’s Eve. Snow had fallen sometime during the morning, but by the evening the soot and salt and grime of the city had turned the soft white blanket into gray shards of ice and brown pools of slush. Sebastian walked a familiar path as all around him groups of families and friends bustled to and from their homes and parties, ready and waiting for the new year to begin.

The silence of the church rang in his ears as he entered and closed the door behind him, shutting out the buzz of the night. New Year’s mass had ended some hours ago and the church was mostly deserted. A young boy was running a duster over the banisters that surrounded the altar and a woman stood with a bowed head by shelf of flickering candles near the rear of the church.

Sebastian knelt in a pew and scrubbed his hands through his hair. What the fuck was he doing here, anyway? He didn’t believe in any gods, he hardly figured Jim would approve of this fixation, and he had no delusions that any time spent here would bring him home any faster than if he spent it at a bar or the gun range or their bloody flat. He only knew that this constant worry, this never ending ache was driving him absolutely insane and for some reason kneeling on the hard floor of the church allowed him to breathe and let go and  _think._

With a sigh, Sebastian bowed his head and ran over contingency plans, absently spinning the ring on his left hand. Some aspects of the business could be sold off to other interested parties, especially the overseas operations. Local operations would be trickier to manage; it would all have to be done very delicately. He didn’t want to instigate a coup by letting fly any rumors that Jim was out of the picture.

A sharp stabbing pain hit his chest at that thought.

“You’ve lost someone, someone very dear.” Sebastian looked up to see a young man with kind eyes standing at the end of his pew, motioning for permission to sit. He recognized him as the priest who’d spoken to him on the first night he’d come here – Father Alexander. Sebastian simply nodded his head and the man sat. “You’re searching for answers, a reason why.”

“I know  _why_ ,” Sebastian said, somewhat bitterly. “I just don’t know _how._ Or  _when_ … or, y’know. If…” he trailed off. If he was ever coming back. The silence stretched out, neither of them speaking, and Sebastian felt as if his visitor was waiting for him to say something more. Eventually, he let out a small sigh. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” he murmured into his hands.

“I take it you’re not usually a man of religion.”

There was no judgment in the man’s eyes when Sebastian looked up. He found himself trusting him, though he supposed that was part of the man’s job, really. “Religion, no. Faith, maybe, but not in any sort of god. Is it that obvious?”

A smile at that. Sebastian looked away as Alexander spoke again, softly. “And it is your faith that has been shaken.”

Maybe it was. His faith that no matter what he got himself into, Jim was always in control of the situation. That he’d always come out on top, the victor, the king. The faith that, at the end of the day, he’d always come back, grinning and ready for the next big scheme. Sebastian just shrugged. He didn’t really trust himself to speak right now.

There was a short silence, and then from the heights of the church tower ancient bells began to ring. “Midnight,” Alexander said, raising his eyes to the rafters briefly before looking back to Sebastian. “For what it’s worth, I find that Matthew has comforted me before in times of uncertainty:  _And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, see that ye be not troubled. For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet._  Remember, no matter how dark it seems right now, all things must come to an end, even pain and suffering.” He laid a hand on Sebastian’s shoulder briefly before standing to leave.

“Thanks,” Sebastian managed to say, adding a hasty, “Father.”

“Happy New Year,” Alexander replied, then turned and headed toward the exit of the church.

With a slight groan and popping of joints, Sebastian raised himself off the floor and into a sitting position on the pew, rubbing circulation back into his knees.  _For all these things must come to pass._  Maybe Father Alexander was right, maybe not. He knew he wasn’t ready to let these feelings pass though, not yet, not just yet because although it hurt, although it was painful, although he was suffering more now than he ever had while in the middle of a fucking war in the desert, these feelings were all he had left of Jim. Take away his pain and you took away the one thing that meant everything to him,  _means_  everything to him because he wasn’t ready to start thinking about Jim in the past tense yet. He just couldn’t bear to part from any little bit of Jim he could cling to right now.

The walk back to the flat was a cold, bitter one. The streets were deserted save for a few drunken, rowdy groups with Auld Lang Syne on their lips in boisterous tones. Sebastian had to cuff one particularly plastered merrymaker ‘round his ears when he got a little too grabby in his enthusiasm. He and his group instinctively bristled for a fight, but one look at the dangerous light in Sebastian’s eyes had them cowed and retreating, muttering vague threats that carried no weight.

He reached the flat without further incident, closing the door as he shrugged out of his coat and hung it in the hall closet. He was knackered, yawning as he tossed his keys onto the hall table. He headed down the hall for the bedroom. A good, long sleep, that’s what he needed. In the morning he’d finally toss out the tree, he really couldn’t keep it up forever, it was a new year after all and besides, dead Christmas trees were a fire hazard, weren’t they? It wouldn’t do to have the place burn down before –

“I’m gone for one month and suddenly you’ve found religion.”

Sebastian’s knees buckled beneath him. He threw out a hand to steady himself against the archway into the living room and closed his eyes. There was a ringing in his ears, everything went fuzzy and he suddenly felt like he’d just taken a fist to the stomach, the wind knocked out of him. No, it felt more like he’d just been completely submerged in ice water. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t think because the only thing running through his brain right now was Jim’s name on loop. After several attempts he finally caught his breath and hoping against hope he hadn’t started hallucinating, he turned his head and opened his eyes.

 “Jim…” the name was barely audible. Jim. Jim was here. Jim was home.

He was sitting in his leather chair by the sofa, thumbing through the Bible that Sebastian had left on the coffee table several sleepless nights ago. He was far too thin, his normally perfectly tailored jacket and designer jeans just a little too baggy, dark circles under his eyes, those eyes, those large chestnut eyes that Sebastian had been missing far more than he even realized. Those eyes that were trained on him now as he tried unsuccessfully to will his legs to move.  _Jim. Jim is right there. Go to him. For fuck’s sake, go to him._

“Where-” Sebastian started but Jim cut him off with a subtle shake of his head and downcast eyes. No, he wouldn’t be getting an explanation.

Jim was standing now, placing the Bible back on the coffee table and crossing to where Sebastian still stood in shock. He laid a hand on Sebastian’s arm and that was all it took to unlock his limbs. He felt a fire spreading across his skin at the touch and he turned and gathered Jim into his arms, holding on as if he thought he might just fade away at any moment. Jim allowed himself to be held, resting his head on Sebastian’s chest as Sebastian pressed kisses into his hair.

Jim squirmed a little under the attention, but Sebastian just held him close. He couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t let him go just yet. “Shh. Jim. Just…” He ran his hands along Jim’s arms, down his back, up through his hair, just letting the feeling of his husband, his lover, his fucking world fill his senses.

They just stood like that for several minutes, Sebastian holding Jim in the middle of the hall. Somewhere in the distance, out beyond the walls of the flat, church bells were still ringing in the new year. When he ducked his head to press a kiss to Jim’s neck, he squeezed his eyes shut there was nothing he could do to stop the hot tears that fell and soaked into the cotton of Jim’s shirt. Jim stiffened slightly in Sebastian’s grip at that – he’d never been very good at handling Sebastian when he got this emotional.

“Hey,” Jim said finally, pulling back slightly so he could face Sebastian. His own eyes were dry – of course they were – but he reached up to run his thumb along Sebastian’s damp cheek. “ _He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away_.” Jim murmured, averting his eyes.

Sebastian chuckled, a bit thickly. “Now who’s the one who’s found religion, hmm?”

“I grew up in Ireland, ‘Bastian, of course I know my Bible.” He tugged Sebastian down and into a kiss, their first kiss in far, far too long. Jim broke it too soon for Sebastian’s liking, nodding his head to their little tree and the still wrapped present beneath. “I didn’t get you anything.”

Sebastian ran a finger along Jim’s jawline and smiled. “Yes you did,” he said before bringing him back into a slow, lingering kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> "Blinking Lights" was an anonymous prompt from tumblr, and then the lovely Relia (lifecrystals.tumblr.com) requested that for her birthday, I write a happy ending for it. Specifically, to bring Jim home before Sebastian had to throw out the tree. This became part two, "Ringing Bells." I'd planned on writing a sequel all along, she just gave me a bit of a push :3


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